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I have a horrible feeling I might regret posting this :-(
In discussions on what makes a good photograph, or on what makes a good photographer, or on when does a photograph become something other than a photograph etc , there is often an underlying confusion because different people have different concepts of what lies behind the intent and objectives for any particular photograph. It seems especially important to have some grasp of why a photograph was taken before rushing into critique or deep discussion.
In "another place", at the end of last year I wrote something on this where I split photography into three overlapping categories aimed at providing a framework for understanding and assessing photographs. Given Ian's recent post, I thought I might revisit it here.
The three categories suggested were : functional photography, documentary photography, and expressive photography.
Functional photography is a very broad category, that includes all photography that is primarily subject (or client) driven. It tends to allow a relatively simple quality assessment approach. At it's most simplistic, this can be something along the lines of "was the client pleased with the results?" "is this a realistic rendering of the beauty I saw in this sunset when I took the photograph", "does this photograph accurately and realistically show the visual information I need to display in my scientific report" or "do these photographs give a good record of my holiday last year".
Expressive photography is primarily photographer driven. It has no easy assessment criteria because the subject can be realistically rendered or completely unrecognisable. A lot of the time the photographs are being made to fill a personal need of the photographer So with expressive photography you usually need to try and look more deeply into the mind and heart of the photographer than you would with functional photography.
I suspect these roughly match Andrew's reportage/artist split.
Documentary Photography was given it's own category as it seemed to clearly contain large elements of both functional and expressive photography, and have its own strict demands on photographic honesty and integrity that aren't a necessity in the other categories. I've now rather abandoned it as part of the core methodology, as the honesty and integrity demand can extend beyond documentary photography.
I think that all photographs will have an intent that combines some elements of both function and personal expression. And part of how we look at, assess, and critique a photograph will depend on how much is functional and how much is expressive. Criticism of functional photographs might focus more on technique, while criticism of expressive photographs might focus more on emotion and message.
As I like numbers, I often build what I call "mind models" to help structure my thoughts. Although, this usually includes some sort of numbers, they have no real meaning and are just an aid to thinking about what kind of photograph you are looking at.
I realise that some, many, most or indeed everyone, may well hate my approach. However, there is no need to go through the process I describe (unless you want to) all that's needed is to have it in the back of your mind to help your thought processes.
The approach is simple and needs a photograph to be given a functional score (between 1 and 9) and an expressive score (between 1 and 9), with the total score adding up to 10.
The lowest and highest scores are deliberately 1 and 9, as I have assumed no photograph can be 100% functional, even a surveillance camera still needs someone to decide where to position it. Nor can it be 100% expressive, as I'm not sure a its possible for a photograph to be 100% removed from a real subject and still be a photograph.
The functional score is scoring how much of the photographs relies on the subject (subject driven) and the technical skills needed by the photographer to take it, and the expressive score is how much the photograph relies on some unique vision of the photographer (photographer driven) and their technical skills at expressing that vision through the photograph.
A range of synonyms can be used instead of functional and expressive. For example you might prefer to use realistic instead of functional and artistic instead of expressive (though I would personally avoid using either artistic or creative). Or you might think of it in terms of an external drivers score and an internal drivers score. I'm happy with functional and expressive.
As an example, typical bird in flight photographs seem largely functional as they appear to rely on mainly technical skills to capture a realistic rendering of an attractive or spectacular bird. As the photograph relies almost entirely on the subject I would give these types of photographs a functional score of say 8 and an expressive score of 2.
As an alternative, a grainy photograph of a blurry bird against a grey stormy sea, where there is an obvious feel of a small but valiant bird fighting against the power of the wind and sea, is likely to have a higher expressive score of say 6 and a functional score of 4.
Or 5 and 5 or 7 and 3, it doesn't really matter as its just a way the forcing you into some structured thinking into understanding the purpose and intent of a photograph, and to help you offer appropriate and useful critique.
A simplistic example of how this might affect a critique, is that a suggestion to use Topaz Denoise AI to the photographer of the first BIF photograph might be useful, but would be nonsensical advice for the second.
Assuming anyone has made this far, an unexpected benefit of this approach has been to allow me to better understand my own photography.
As a life long birder I enjoy a bit of bird photography, but it's never given me the same emotional/spiritual satisfaction that making or looking at landscape type photographs give me.
This gave me a particular problems when it came to processing as I struggled to reconcile the different levels of effort I put into my bird photographs compared to my landscape photographs. Often feeling I was "short changing" my bird photographs.
Clearly identifying my bird photography as 80% functional allowed me to understand that their place in my photography is to give me a fun, mainly technical challenge that only requires minimal processing. This has made it easier to focus my serious photographic efforts on my expressive and more emotionally demanding landscape photographs, while still enjoying my bird photography.
EDIT
I can't say the discussion prompted by my post has gone exactly as I had hoped, and I am off to rethink how I might better explain things.
I still think that at it's core, my suggestion is an easily applied approach to stimulate thinking about the context of a photograph before moving on to further discussion and critique.
However, before I move on, I'd like to post definitions of two types of photography from Droj, from an unrelated thread, that could be used as rather more elegant alternatives to my functional and expressive categories:
"Some photographs are primarily of 'things' - they register (document) a person, a thing, a place, an object, an occurrence. They have a reporting function. This can be a valuable communication in the time that the image was made, and have a historical / social or other relevance too." as an alternative to functional
"The nature of some images is more in the realm of visual experience itself - a human / cultural expression. We have the frame, and within that the picture space which can be organised by the photographer to have a certain psychological resonance that might be recognised by others. Not in the somewhat wooden way of saying this is a such and such, but more in the way of direct, non-cerebral engagement." as an alternative to expressive.
The other possible way of thinking about the categories is John Szarkowski's Window and Mirror approach:
"The two photographers characterize opposite modes of the new photography, with its divergence between those who believe that art is a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, and those who see it as a window, through which one may better know the world."
From: his introduction to the catalogue for the 1978 MOMA exhibition "Mirrors and Windows: American photography since 1960"
I felt that my looser and less well defined functional and expressive categories could incorporate more refined and better defined characterisations such as these, and others, while at the same time having sufficient clarity of meaning. Maybe I was wrong.
There was some discussion later on in this thread (in response to questions from sirch) on how the functional/expressive categories might be used, and they might be a useful expansion to the examples given here. They are linked below:
www.talkphotography.co.uk
www.talkphotography.co.uk
Finally, I would like to emphasise that the use of the numbers is not to try and provide some sort of objective or quantifiable score, they are simply representing a ranking of how far away or how close you think a photograph might be from being entirely functional or entirely expressive. They are simply a shorthand way of saying something that would otherwise need several words.
In discussions on what makes a good photograph, or on what makes a good photographer, or on when does a photograph become something other than a photograph etc , there is often an underlying confusion because different people have different concepts of what lies behind the intent and objectives for any particular photograph. It seems especially important to have some grasp of why a photograph was taken before rushing into critique or deep discussion.
In "another place", at the end of last year I wrote something on this where I split photography into three overlapping categories aimed at providing a framework for understanding and assessing photographs. Given Ian's recent post, I thought I might revisit it here.
The three categories suggested were : functional photography, documentary photography, and expressive photography.
Functional photography is a very broad category, that includes all photography that is primarily subject (or client) driven. It tends to allow a relatively simple quality assessment approach. At it's most simplistic, this can be something along the lines of "was the client pleased with the results?" "is this a realistic rendering of the beauty I saw in this sunset when I took the photograph", "does this photograph accurately and realistically show the visual information I need to display in my scientific report" or "do these photographs give a good record of my holiday last year".
Expressive photography is primarily photographer driven. It has no easy assessment criteria because the subject can be realistically rendered or completely unrecognisable. A lot of the time the photographs are being made to fill a personal need of the photographer So with expressive photography you usually need to try and look more deeply into the mind and heart of the photographer than you would with functional photography.
I suspect these roughly match Andrew's reportage/artist split.
Documentary Photography was given it's own category as it seemed to clearly contain large elements of both functional and expressive photography, and have its own strict demands on photographic honesty and integrity that aren't a necessity in the other categories. I've now rather abandoned it as part of the core methodology, as the honesty and integrity demand can extend beyond documentary photography.
I think that all photographs will have an intent that combines some elements of both function and personal expression. And part of how we look at, assess, and critique a photograph will depend on how much is functional and how much is expressive. Criticism of functional photographs might focus more on technique, while criticism of expressive photographs might focus more on emotion and message.
As I like numbers, I often build what I call "mind models" to help structure my thoughts. Although, this usually includes some sort of numbers, they have no real meaning and are just an aid to thinking about what kind of photograph you are looking at.
I realise that some, many, most or indeed everyone, may well hate my approach. However, there is no need to go through the process I describe (unless you want to) all that's needed is to have it in the back of your mind to help your thought processes.
The approach is simple and needs a photograph to be given a functional score (between 1 and 9) and an expressive score (between 1 and 9), with the total score adding up to 10.
The lowest and highest scores are deliberately 1 and 9, as I have assumed no photograph can be 100% functional, even a surveillance camera still needs someone to decide where to position it. Nor can it be 100% expressive, as I'm not sure a its possible for a photograph to be 100% removed from a real subject and still be a photograph.
The functional score is scoring how much of the photographs relies on the subject (subject driven) and the technical skills needed by the photographer to take it, and the expressive score is how much the photograph relies on some unique vision of the photographer (photographer driven) and their technical skills at expressing that vision through the photograph.
A range of synonyms can be used instead of functional and expressive. For example you might prefer to use realistic instead of functional and artistic instead of expressive (though I would personally avoid using either artistic or creative). Or you might think of it in terms of an external drivers score and an internal drivers score. I'm happy with functional and expressive.
As an example, typical bird in flight photographs seem largely functional as they appear to rely on mainly technical skills to capture a realistic rendering of an attractive or spectacular bird. As the photograph relies almost entirely on the subject I would give these types of photographs a functional score of say 8 and an expressive score of 2.
As an alternative, a grainy photograph of a blurry bird against a grey stormy sea, where there is an obvious feel of a small but valiant bird fighting against the power of the wind and sea, is likely to have a higher expressive score of say 6 and a functional score of 4.
Or 5 and 5 or 7 and 3, it doesn't really matter as its just a way the forcing you into some structured thinking into understanding the purpose and intent of a photograph, and to help you offer appropriate and useful critique.
A simplistic example of how this might affect a critique, is that a suggestion to use Topaz Denoise AI to the photographer of the first BIF photograph might be useful, but would be nonsensical advice for the second.
Assuming anyone has made this far, an unexpected benefit of this approach has been to allow me to better understand my own photography.
As a life long birder I enjoy a bit of bird photography, but it's never given me the same emotional/spiritual satisfaction that making or looking at landscape type photographs give me.
This gave me a particular problems when it came to processing as I struggled to reconcile the different levels of effort I put into my bird photographs compared to my landscape photographs. Often feeling I was "short changing" my bird photographs.
Clearly identifying my bird photography as 80% functional allowed me to understand that their place in my photography is to give me a fun, mainly technical challenge that only requires minimal processing. This has made it easier to focus my serious photographic efforts on my expressive and more emotionally demanding landscape photographs, while still enjoying my bird photography.
EDIT
I can't say the discussion prompted by my post has gone exactly as I had hoped, and I am off to rethink how I might better explain things.
I still think that at it's core, my suggestion is an easily applied approach to stimulate thinking about the context of a photograph before moving on to further discussion and critique.
However, before I move on, I'd like to post definitions of two types of photography from Droj, from an unrelated thread, that could be used as rather more elegant alternatives to my functional and expressive categories:
"Some photographs are primarily of 'things' - they register (document) a person, a thing, a place, an object, an occurrence. They have a reporting function. This can be a valuable communication in the time that the image was made, and have a historical / social or other relevance too." as an alternative to functional
"The nature of some images is more in the realm of visual experience itself - a human / cultural expression. We have the frame, and within that the picture space which can be organised by the photographer to have a certain psychological resonance that might be recognised by others. Not in the somewhat wooden way of saying this is a such and such, but more in the way of direct, non-cerebral engagement." as an alternative to expressive.
The other possible way of thinking about the categories is John Szarkowski's Window and Mirror approach:
"The two photographers characterize opposite modes of the new photography, with its divergence between those who believe that art is a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, and those who see it as a window, through which one may better know the world."
From: his introduction to the catalogue for the 1978 MOMA exhibition "Mirrors and Windows: American photography since 1960"
I felt that my looser and less well defined functional and expressive categories could incorporate more refined and better defined characterisations such as these, and others, while at the same time having sufficient clarity of meaning. Maybe I was wrong.
There was some discussion later on in this thread (in response to questions from sirch) on how the functional/expressive categories might be used, and they might be a useful expansion to the examples given here. They are linked below:
Concepts - What kind of photograph is it?
I have a horrible feeling I might regret posting this :-( In discussions on what makes a good photograph, or on what makes a good photographer, or on when does a photograph become something other than a photograph etc , there is often an underlying confusion because different people have...
www.talkphotography.co.uk
Concepts - What kind of photograph is it?
I have a horrible feeling I might regret posting this :-( In discussions on what makes a good photograph, or on what makes a good photographer, or on when does a photograph become something other than a photograph etc , there is often an underlying confusion because different people have...
www.talkphotography.co.uk
Finally, I would like to emphasise that the use of the numbers is not to try and provide some sort of objective or quantifiable score, they are simply representing a ranking of how far away or how close you think a photograph might be from being entirely functional or entirely expressive. They are simply a shorthand way of saying something that would otherwise need several words.
Last edited:
